Hi everyone :)Sorry I haven't been able to participate much in discussions. I'm particularly interested in the suggestions for structure/goals etc., although I think Christian isn't sufficiently aware of his strengths as a leader.
I'd also really like to reduce some of the barriers to translation participation, and find ways to encourage more people to take part.
On 04/07/2008, at 2:56 PM, Christian Perrier wrote:
Quoting Eddy Petri?or (eddy.petrisor@gmail.com):OTOH, I was thinking (strictly for the debian-l10n-romanian team) to have some kind of repo that would contain all the initiated translations for a language. The team coordinator would be responsible to add new files tothe repo according to criteria that is relevant for that team'sgoals[1]. All what the translators would have to worry about would be tokeep all the translations in the team repo at 100% and the goal is already set.Well, there are such ideas floating around i18n.debian.net and Pootle, indeed. The basic one would be to commit all material from unstable (the one you can currently access from the debconf stats pages) to a VCS and have Pootle point this SVN as a project.
In particular, I have noticed what a difference it makes to participation if you have a Pootle server (eight of my projects are using Pootle now). I know we still have some scale issues with putting the whole of D-I and debconf and heaven knows what else onto a single Pootle, but meanwhile, could we please just put _some_ of the files up there? That would make it easier to attract new translators, and easier to do the task itself.
Then, using the goals assignment and such stuff in Pootle, team coords could prioritize the teams work.
This really worked for my team at OpenOffice.org (and continues to work).
Doing so would not require people to use Pootle as they could perfectly work on a VCS checkout instea of working through Pootle.
Exactly: Pootle is a tool, which you can use in your workflow in the way that suits you best.
I didn't know Ubuntu had a translation invitation item in its menus, but this is the sort of thing that bridges the gap. How difficult would it be to build something similar into a Debian Help menu? It could take you straight to a friendly, introductory webpage with useful links.
I'm also strongly in favour of making more manpages and docs available in PO format, via po4a and the Translate Toolkit. Even better, if we can get them up on Pootle (available as PO or XLIFF), we would have a much better chance of getting translators for them.
If we build a translation invitation into Debian, we can create a feedback process that will link the huge numbers of Debian users to the relatively tiny number of Debian volunteers. We need better PR, and much better communication with our users.
We already have some excellent resources and processes, but we need to bridge the gap between them and the non-techie linguist.
Doing the early bricks of this shouldn't be hard: the scripts gathering the material are there on churro. They could be modifid to commit in a VCS (and that, by triaging the packages in whatrever way we would prefer) and the, we could add some more magic over this (incl. Pootle but not only it). More or less planning to work on this at debconf with faw and nekral. We could coordinate that on #debian-i18n for people who will not attend Debconf. We're also planning to work on that at the Extremadura meeting (I don't think we'll make it in Septembre: that's not convenient for me as too close to Debconf....better in November or so if that's doable with Extremadura people).
It all sounds good: I look forward to hearing about it. I'll try to get my head around some more details for improving participation, too. :)
from Clytie Vietnamese Free Software Translation Team http://vnoss.net/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=projects:l10n
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